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Memoirs

The annual list below contains selections from the New York Times annual list of 100 Notable Books of the Year, Publishers Weekly's annual Best Books of the Year lists, and starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist.  For more reading suggestions check out Madison Public Library Insider newsletter-- Thanks For the Memories: Biographies and Memoirs.

2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017  

2021

Cover of Punch Me Up to the Gods
Brian
Broome

An engrossing memoir about growing up Black and gay and finding a place in the world. Structured around Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem "We Real Cool,” Broome’s thought-provoking, emotional journey unfolds through a clever use of parallel stories and juxtaposition. Beautifully written, this examination of what it means to be Black and gay in America is a must-read. A stellar debut memoir.

Cover of Seeing Ghosts
Kat
Chow

After her mother dies unexpectedly of cancer, a Chinese American writer and journalist weaves together the story of the fallout of grief that follows her extended family as they emigrate from China and Hong Kong to Cuba and America.

Cover of The Copenhagen Trilogy: Ch
Trove Irma Margit
Ditlevsen

Though freely flowing with the cadence of diary entries, Ditlevsen’s narration nonetheless maintains intensive focus, demarcated with razor-sharp prose. This confessional masterpiece stands as the crowning achievement of Ditlevsen’s fiercely adventuresome and maverick legacy.

Cover of Somebody’s Daughter
Ashley
Ford

Somebody's Daughter steps into the world of growing up a poor Black girl, exploring how isolating and complex such a childhood can be. As Ashley battles her body and her environment, she provides a poignant coming-of-age recollection that speaks to finding the threads between who you are and what you were born into, and the complicated familial love that often binds them.

Cover of On Juneteenth
Annette
Gordon-Reed

Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts the origins of Juneteenth and explores the legacies of the holiday that remain with us. A commemoration of Juneteenth and the fraught legacies of slavery that still persist, On Juneteenth is a stark reminder that the fight for equality is ongoing.

Cover of Read Until You Understand:
Farah Jasmine
Griffin

 In Read Until You Understand-a line from a note her father wrote to Griffin-she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that framed the United States Constitution and that inspired Malcolm X's fervent speeches, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the artistry of Romare Bearden, and many others. Griffin explores themes such as grace, justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, and mercy to help readers grapple with the ongoing project that is American democracy. Joining her experiences in Black communities with her immersion in the glorious works of Black artists, Read Until You Understand is a powerful testament to the enduring wisdom of Black culture and history.

Cover of I Live a Life Like Yours
Jan
Grue

Grue elegantly flows between memoir, essay, and intellectual discourse in this magnificent story about living with a disability. He brilliantly articulates what it’s like to be 'erased and rewritten,' and, more poignantly, what it’s like to obliterate the narrative one’s been handed. This stunning work isn’t to be missed.

Cover of Everything I have is Yours
Eleanor
Henderson

Where does physical illness end and mental illness begin? Where does one person end and another begin? And how do we exist alongside someone else's suffering? Emotional, propulsive, and at times heartbreaking, Eleanor Henderson's Everything I Have Is Yours tells the story of a marriage tested by powerful forces out of both partners' control. It's not only a memoir of a wife's tireless quest to heal her husband, but one that asks just what it means to accept someone as they are.

Cover of Between Two Kingdoms: A Me
Suleika
Jaouad

An Emmy Award-winning writer and activist describes the harrowing years she spent in early adulthood fighting leukemia and how she learned to live again while forging connections with other survivors of profound illness and suffering.

Cover of Better to Have Gone: Love,
Akash
Kapur

Better to Have Gone blends memoir, history, sociology, and politics. It probes the under-explored yet universal idea of utopia, and it portrays in vivid detail the daily life of one particular utopian community striving to create a better world. Above all, it is a love story about two doomed and idealistic dreamers, wrapped in the longing of the daughter who has lost them.

Cover of Chasing Me to My Grave: An
Winfred
Rembert

In Chasing Me to My Grave, Rembert relates his life in prose and paintings--vivid, confrontational, revelatory, complex scenes from the cotton fields and chain gangs of the segregated south to the churches and night clubs of the urban north. This is also the story of finding epic love, and with it the courage to revisit a past that begs to remain buried, as told to Tufts philosopher Erin I. Kelly.

Cover of Concepcion: An Immigrant F
Albert
Samaha

Excavating his family's history back to the region's unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, Japanese occupation, and American intervention, Samaha fits his family's arc into the wider story of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers. And by relating their personal history with warmth and affection but also clear-eyed skepticism, Concepcion explores what it might mean to reckon with imperialism's unjust legacy, to live with contradiction and hope, to fight for the unrealized ideals of an inherited homeland.

Cover of Finding the Mother Tree: D
Suzanne
Simard

Now, in her first book, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths-that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own. And as she writes of her scientific quest, she writes of her own journey-of love and loss, of observation and change, of risk and reward, making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology, that it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world, and, in writing of her own life, we come to see the true connectedness of the Mother Tree that nurtures the forest in the profound ways that families and human societies do, and how these inseparable bonds enable all our survival.

Cover of I Came as a Shadow
John
Thompson

After five decades at the center of race and sports in America, Thompson was ready to make the private public, and he completed this autobiography shortly before his death. His book drives us through his childhood under Jim Crow segregation to our current moment of racial reckoning. His life on and off the basketball court threw America's unresolved struggle with racial justice into sharp relief.

Cover of Three Girls from Bronzevil
Dawn
Turner

With a keen investigative eye and intimate detail, Dawn chronicles the dramatic turns that send the three sisters' lives careening in very different -- and shocking -- directions over the decades. The result is a powerful tour de force on the complex interplay of race and opportunity, class and womanhood and how those forces shape our lives and our capacity for resilience and redemption.

Cover of Beautiful Country
Qian Julie
Wang

An incandescent and heartrending memoir about Qian Julie Wang's five years living undocumented after immigrating with her parents from China to New York City in 1994. Searing and unforgettable, Beautiful Country is an essential book about the cost of making a home in a hostile land from an astonishing new talent.

Cover of Crying in H Mart
Michelle
Zauner

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist.

2020

Cover of Is Rape a Crime?: A Memoir
Michelle
Bowdler

Alice Sebold meets Roxane Gay in Michelle Bowdler's literary debut, telling her story of rape and recovery while interrogating why one of society's most serious crimes goes largely uninvestigated.

Cover of Good Boy: My Life in Seven
Jennifer Finney
Boylan

In Good Boy, Boylan explores what should be the simplest topic in the world, but never is: finding and giving love. Good Boy is a universal account of a remarkable story: showing how a young boy became a middle-aged woman-accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs. 'Everything I know about love,' she writes, 'I learned from dogs. Their love enables us pull off what seem like impossible feats: to find our way home when we are lost, to live our lives with humor and courage, and above all, to best become our true selves.'

Cover of Dirt: Adventures in Lyon a
Bill
Buford

Bill Buford turns his inimitable attention from Italian cuisine to the food of France. Baffled by the language, but convinced that he can master the art of French cooking - or at least get to the bottom of why it is so revered - he begins what becomes a five-year odyssey by shadowing the esteemed French chef, Michel Richard, in Washington, D.C. But when Buford (quickly) realizes that a stage in France is necessary, he goes--this time with his wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow--to Lyon, the gastronomic capital of France.

Cover of Notes on a Silencing
Lacy
Crawford

Traces the author's healing journey after a traumatizing sexual assault at infamous St. Paul's boarding school, describing how she helped police uncover proof of the school's institutionalized mandate of silence.

Cover of Desert Notebooks: A Road M
Ben
Ehrenreich

Employing an elegant, discursive style that interweaves memoir with science writing, creation myths, and history, National Magazine Award winner and The Nation columnist Ben Ehrenreich uses the desolate landscape of the American desert -the main locales for the book are Joshua Tree and Las Vegas- as a springboard to examine how we formulate our concepts of time and what it means to confront the looming apocalypse.

Cover of The Beauty in Breaking
Michele
Harper

Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in an abusive family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn't move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman. In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken--physically, emotionally, psychically. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process.

Cover of Being Heumann: An Unrepent
Judith
Heumann

One of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her personal story of fighting for the right to receive an education, have a job, and just be human. A story of fighting to belong in a world that wasn't built for all of us and of one woman's activism--from the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco to inside the halls of Washington--Being Heumann recounts Judy Heumann's lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society.

Cover of The Biggest Bluff: How I L
Maria
Konnikova

How a New York Times bestselling author and New Yorker contributor parlayed a strong grasp of the science of human decision-making and a woeful ignorance of cards into a life-changing run as a professional poker player, under the wing of a legend of the game, Erik Seidel.

Cover of The Dragons, the Giant, th
Wayétu
Moore

When Wayétu Moore turns five years old, her father and grandmother throw her a big birthday party at their home in Monrovia, Liberia, but all she can think about is how much she misses her mother, who is working and studying in faraway New York. Before she gets the reunion her father promised her, war breaks out in Liberia. The family is forced to flee their home on foot, walking and hiding for three weeks until they arrive in the village of Lai. Finally, a rebel soldier smuggles them across the border to Sierra Leone, reuniting the family and setting them off on yet another journey, this time to the United States.

Cover of A Promised Land
Barack
Obama

Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency--a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.

Cover of The Book of Eels: Our Endu
Patrik
Svensson

Drawing on a breadth of research about eels in literature, history, and modern marine biology, as well as his own experience fishing for eels with his father, Patrik Svensson crafts a mesmerizing portrait of an unusual, utterly misunderstood, and completely captivating animal. Blending memoir and nature writing at its best, Svensson's journey to understand the eel becomes an exploration of the human condition that delves into overarching issues about our roots and destiny, both as humans and as animals, and, ultimately, how to handle the biggest question of all: death. The result is a gripping and slippery narrative that will surprise and enchant.

Cover of The Loneliness of the Long
Adrian
Tomine

What happens when a childhood hobby grows into a lifelong career? The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, Adrian Tomine's funniest and most revealing foray into autobiography, offers an array of unexpected answers. When a sudden medical incident lands Tomine in the emergency room, he begins to question if it was really all worthwhile: despite the accolades and opportunities of a seemingly charmed career, it's the gaffes, humiliations, slights, and insults he's experienced (or caused) within the industry that loom largest in his memory.

Cover of Memorial Drive: A Daughter
Natasha D
Trethewey

At nineteen Trethewey's world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma. Here she explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a 'child of miscegenation' in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.

Cover of The Undocumented Americans
Karla
Cornejo Villavicencio

Traveling across the country, journalist Karla Cornejo Villavicencio risked arrest at every turn to report the extraordinary stories of her fellow undocumented Americans. Her subjects have every reason to be wary around reporters, but Cornejo Villavicencio has unmatched access to their stories. She weaves her own story among those of the eleven million undocumented who have been thrust into the national conversation today as never before.

Cover of Uncanny Valley
Anna
Wiener

Part coming-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wieners memoir is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power. With wit, candor, and heart, Anna deftly charts the tech industry's shift from self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment. Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand.

2019

Cover of Places and Names: On War,
Elliot
Ackerman

From a decorated Marine war veteran and National Book Award finalist, an astonishing reckoning with the nature of combat and the human cost of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
 

Cover of Motherhood So White: A Mem
Nefertiti
Austin

Writer and professor Nefertiti Austin chose to start her family by adopting. She knew she wanted to adopt a Black boy out of the Los Angeles foster care system. She also chose to do it as a single mother. All those factors would make it tough enough, but Nefertiti hadn't bargained with the lack of resources available to her, or the pushback she would get from her own family. You see, Nefertiti is Black and the path she chose to follow was nearly unheard of in her community. In this unflinching account of her parenting journey, Nefertiti examines the history of adoption in the African American community, faces off against stereotypes of single Black moms, and confronts the reality of what it looks like to raise children of color in racially charged, modern-day America.

Cover of The Undying: A Meditation
Anne
Boyer

A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. Her story is a fresh, fierce, and timely meditation on data, pain, time, and the limited capacity of literature to comprehend life and death in a sensate and vulnerable body. 

Cover of Wild Game: My Mother, Her
Adrienne
Brodeur

A daughter's tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity.  Available to download: eBook

Cover of All That You Leave Behind:
Erin Lee
Carr

A celebrated journalist, bestselling author, and recovering addict, David Carr was in the prime of his career when he suffered a fatal collapse in 2015. Shattered by his death, his daughter Erin Lee Carr, an up-and-coming documentary filmmaker, began combing through the entirety of their shared correspondence-1,936 items in total-in search of comfort and support. Through this lens, Erin comes to understand her own workplace missteps, existential crises, and relationship fails. This unique combination of Erin's earnest prose and her father's meaningful words offers a compelling read that shows us what it means to be vulnerable and lost, supported and found.  Available to download: Audio

Cover of Dapper Dan: Made In Harlem
Daniel R.
Day

With his now-legendary store on 125th Street in Harlem, Dapper Dan pioneered high-end streetwear in the 1980s, remixing classic luxury-brand logos into his own innovative, glamorous designs. But before he reinvented haute couture, he was a hungry boy with holes in his shoes, a teen who daringly gambled drug dealers out of their money, and a young man in a prison cell who found nourishment in books. In this remarkable memoir, he tells his full story for the first time.

Cover of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir
Jaquira
Díaz

Jaquira Díaz writes an unflinching account of growing up as a queer biracial girl searching for home as her family splits apart and her mother struggles with mental illness and addiction. From her own struggles with depression and drug abuse to her experiences of violence to Puerto Rico's history of colonialism, every page vibrates with music and lyricism.

Cover of Life Undercover: Coming of
Amaryllis
Fox

Amaryllis Fox's riveting memoir tells the story of her ten years in the most elite clandestine ops unit of the CIA, hunting the world's most dangerous terrorists in sixteen countries while marrying and giving birth to a daughter.  Available to download: eBook

Cover of Consent: A Memoir of Unwan
Donna
Freitas

Donna Freitas has lived two lives. In one life, she is a well-published author and respected scholar who has traveled around the country speaking about Title IX, consent, religion, and sex on college campuses. In the other, she is a victim, a woman who suffered and suffers still because she was stalked by her graduate professor for more than two years. In this memoir, Freitas delivers a forensic examination of the years she spent stalked by her professor, and uses her nightmarish experience to examine the ways in which we stigmatize, debate, and attempt to understand consent today.

Cover of A Bookshop in Berlin: The
Françoise
Frenkel

In 1921, Françoise Frenkel, a Jewish woman from Poland, fulfills a lifelong dream. She opens Berlin's first French-language bookshop. But Frenkel's bookshop is destroyed on Kristallnacht, and she flees to Paris. With invading German Nazis forcing her to run from one safe house to the next, Frenkel survives at the heroic hands of strangers risking their lives to protect her. Published quietly in 1945, then rediscovered nearly sixty years later in an attic, A Bookshop in Berlin is a remarkable story of survival and resilience, of human cruelty and human spirit.  Available to download: Audio

Cover of Travel Light, Move Fast
Alexandra
Fuller

After her father's sudden death, Alexandra Fuller realizes that if she is going to weather his loss, she will need to become the parts of him she misses most. So begins Travel Light, Move Fast, the unforgettable story of Tim Fuller, a self-exiled black sheep who moved to Africa to fight in the Rhodesian Bush War before settling as a banana farmer in Zambia. A man who preferred chaos to predictability, to revel in promise rather than wallow in regret, and who was more afraid of becoming bored than of getting lost, he taught his daughters to live as if everything needed to happen all together, all at once--or not at all. Now, in the wake of his death, Fuller internalizes his lessons with clear eyes and celebrates a man who swallowed life whole.  Available to download: eBook
 

Cover of The Last Ocean: A Journey
Nicci
Gerrard

After a diagnosis of dementia, Nicci Gerrard's father, John, continued to live life on his own terms, alongside the disease. But when an isolating hospital stay precipitated a dramatic turn for the worse, Gerrard, an award-winning journalist and author, recognized that it was not just the disease, but misguided protocol and harmful practices that cause such pain at the end of life. The Last Ocean is Gerrard's investigation into what dementia does to both the person who lives with the condition and to their caregivers. Gerrard gives raw but literary shape both to the unimaginable loss of one's own faculties, as well as to the pain of their loved ones. Her lens is unflinching, but Gerrard honors her subjects and finds the beauty and the humanity in their seemingly diminished states. 
 

Cover of Haben: The Deafblind Woman
Haben
Girma

The incredible life story of Haben Girma, the first Deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School, and her amazing journey from isolation to the world stage.  Available to download: Audio

Cover of Once More We Saw Stars: A
Jayson
Greene

As the book opens: two-year-old Greta Greene is sitting with her grandmother on a park bench on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A brick crumbles from a windowsill overhead, striking her unconscious, and she is immediately rushed to the hospital. But although it begins with this event and with the anguish Jayson and his wife, Stacy, confront in the wake of their daughter's trauma and the hours leading up to her death, Once More We Saw Stars quickly becomes a narrative that is as much about hope and healing as it is about grief and loss. With raw honesty, deep emotion, and exquisite tenderness, Greene captures both the fragility of life and absoluteness of death, and most important of all, the unconquerable power of love.  Available to download: eBook  Audio
 

Cover of I'm Telling the Truth, but
Bassey
Ikpi

In this viscerally raw and honest work, Bassey Ikpi explores her life--as a Nigerian-American immigrant, a black woman, a slam poet, a mother, a daughter, an artist--through the lens of her mental health and diagnosis of bipolar II and anxiety. Her remarkable memoir in essays implodes our preconceptions of the mind and normalcy as Bassey bares her own truths and lies for us all to behold with radical honesty and brutal intimacy.

Cover of Survival Math: Notes on an
Mitchell S.
Jackson

With a poet's gifted ear, a novelist's sense of narrative, and a journalist's unsentimental eye, Mitchell S. Jackson candidly explores his tumultuous youth in the other America. The book takes its name from the calculations Mitchell and his family made to stay alive and to keep safe in their community, a small black neighborhood in Portland, Oregon blighted by drugs, violence, poverty, and governmental neglect.

Cover of How We Fight for Our Lives
Saeed
Jones

Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir,  the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence--into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another--and to one another--as we fight to become ourselves.  Available to download: eBook  Audio

Cover of Every Man a Hero: A Memoir
Ray
Lambert

Seventy-five years ago, he hit Omaha Beach with the first wave. Now Ray Lambert, ninety-eight years old, delivers one of the most remarkable memoirs, a tour-de-force of remembrance evoking his role as a decorated World War II medic who risked his life to save the heroes of D-Day.
 

Cover of In the Dream House: A Memo
Carmen Maria
Machado

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Machado's dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.  Available to download: Audio

Cover of Blood: A Memoir
Allison
Moorer

Moorer turns her lyrical storytelling powers to recount the events leading up to the moment that forever altered her own life and that of her older sister, Shelby, with whom she shares an unbreakable bond. Gorgeously written, this work delves into the meaning of inheritance and destiny, shame, and trauma--and how it is possible to carve out a safe place in the world despite it all.  Available to download: eBook

Cover of Broken Places & Outer Spac
Nnedi
Okorafor

In Broken Places & Outer Spaces, acclaimed author Nnedi Okorafor takes the reader on a journey from her hospital bed following a surgery that left her temporarily paralyzed  deep into her memories, from her painful first experiences with racism as a child in Chicago to her powerful visits to her parents' hometown in Nigeria. Through her own story, as well as explorations of the compelling stories of other great artists and writers who have pushed through their limitations, using hardship to fuel their work, Nnedi reveals a universal truth: What we perceive as limitations have the potential to become our greatest strengths--far greater than when we were unbroken.
 

Cover of Unfollow: A Memoir of Lovi
Megan
Phelps-Roper

The activist and TED speaker Megan Phelps-Roper reveals her life growing up in the most hated family in America. Rich with suspense and thoughtful reflection, her life story exposes the dangers of black-and-white thinking and the need for true humility in a time of angry polarization.  Available to download: eBook

Cover of The Education of an Ideali
Samantha
Power

An intimate, powerful, and galvanizing memoir by Pulitzer Prize winner, human rights advocate, and former UN Ambassador Samantha Power, in which Power offers an urgent response to the question "What can one person do?" and a call for a clearer eye, a kinder heart, and a more open and civil hand in our politics and daily lives.  Available to download: eBook  Audio

Cover of River of Fire: My Spiritua
Helen
Prejean

The author of Dead Man Walking, the nation's foremost leader in efforts to abolish the death penalty, shares the story of her growth as a spiritual leader, speaks out about the challenges of the Catholic Church, and shows that joy and religion are not mutually exclusive.  Available to download: eBook  

Cover of Save Me the Plums: My Gour
Ruth
Reichl

When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America's oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone's boss. Yet Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no? Complete with recipes, Save Me the Plums is the story of how Reichl, along with legendary chefs, idiosyncratic writers, and a colorful group of editors and art directors, transformed stately Gourmet into a cutting-edge publication, as well as a personal journey of a woman coming to terms with being in charge and making a mark, following a passion and holding on to her dreams--even when she ends up in a place she never expected to be.  Available to download: eBook  Audio
 

Cover of Tough Love: My Story of th
Susan
Rice

Recalling pivotal moments from her dynamic career on the front lines of American diplomacy and foreign policy, Susan E. Rice -- National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations -- delivers an inspiring account of a life in service to family and country.  Available to download: eBook  Audio

Cover of Mighty Justice: My Life in
Dovey Johnson
Roundtree

In Mighty Justice, trailblazing African American civil rights attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree recounts her inspiring life story that speaks movingly and urgently to our racially troubled times. At a time when African American attorneys had to leave the courthouses to use the bathroom, Roundtree took on Washington's white legal establishment and prevailed, winning a 1955 landmark bus desegregation case that would help to dismantle the practice of "separate but equal" and shatter Jim Crow laws. Later, she led the vanguard of women ordained to the ministry in the AME Church in 1961, merging her law practice with her ministry to fight for families and children being destroyed by urban violence. Dovey Roundtree passed away in 2018 at the age of 104. Though her achievements were significant and influential, she remains largely unknown to the American public. Mighty Justice corrects the historical record. 

Cover of Inheritance: A Memoir of G
Dani
Shapiro

Spring, 2016. Through a genealogy website to which she had submitted her DNA for analysis, Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. Her entire history crumbled beneath her. This is the story of her quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing on themes of identity and family history. She shows that science and technology may have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.  Available to download: eBook  Audio

Cover of Solitary
Albert
Woodfox

Solitary is the unforgettable life story of a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement--in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell, 23 hours a day, in notorious Angola prison in Louisiana--all for a crime he did not commit. That Albert Woodfox survived was, in itself, a feat of extraordinary endurance against the violence and deprivation he faced daily. That he was able to emerge whole from his odyssey within America's prison and judicial systems is a triumph of the human spirit, and makes his book a clarion call to reform the inhumanity of solitary confinement in the U.S. and around the world.

Cover of The Unwinding of the Mirac
Julie
Yip-Williams

That Julie Yip-Williams survived infancy was a miracle. Born blind in Vietnam, she narrowly escaped euthanasia. Her family fled their country's political upheaval in the late 1970s, and in America a surgeon at UCLA gave Julie partial sight. She became a Harvard-educated lawyer with a husband, two little girls, and a life that once seemed impossible. Then, at thirty-seven, she was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began. With humor, bracing honesty, and the cleansing power of well-deployed anger, Julie set the stage for her lasting legacy and one final miracle: the story of her life.  Available to download: eBook  Audio

2018

Cover of Fox Hunt: A Refugee’s Me
Mohammed
Al Samawi

A gripping account of terror and escape, The Fox Hunt tells one young man's unforgettable story of his harrowing escape from Yemen's brutal civil war with the help of a daring plan engineered on social media by a small group of interfaith activists in the West.

Cover of We Fed an Island: The True
José
Andrés

Chef José Andrés arrived in Puerto Rico four days after Hurricane Maria ripped through the island and addressed the humanitarian crisis the only way he knew how: by feeding people, one hot meal at a time. Based on Andrés's insider's take as well as on meetings, messages, and conversations he had while in Puerto Rico, We Fed an Island movingly describes how a network of community kitchens activated real change and tells an extraordinary story of hope in the face of disasters both natural and man-made, offering suggestions for how to address a crisis like this in the future. 
 

Cover of Don’t You Ever: My Mothe
Mary Carter
Bishop

From a prizewinning journalist, a moving and beautifully rendered memoir about the half-brother she didn't know existed that hauntingly explores family, class, secrets, and fate.
 

Cover of Small Fry: A Memoir
Lisa
Brennan-Jobs

Born on a farm and named in a field by her parents―artist Chrisann Brennan and Steve Jobs―Lisa Brennan-Jobs's childhood unfolded in a rapidly changing Silicon Valley. When she was young, Lisa's father was a mythical figure who was rarely present in her life. As she grew older, her father took an interest in her, ushering her into a new world of mansions, vacations, and private schools. His attention was thrilling, but he could also be cold, critical and unpredictable. When her relationship with her mother grew strained in high school, Lisa decided to move in with her father, hoping he'd become the parent she'd always wanted him to be. Part portrait of a complex family, part love letter to California in the seventies and eighties, Small Fry is a poignant coming-of-age story from one of our most exciting new literary voices.  Available to download: Audio 
 

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Francisco
Cantú

For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line.  Available to download: eBook  Audio
 

Cover of All You Can Ever Know
Nicole
Chung

Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. She was told her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But Nicole grew up facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn't see, and wondered if the story she'd been told was the whole truth. Here Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, and chronicles the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets. Available to download: eBook 
 

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Bill
Cunningham

Fashion Climbing is the story of a young man striving to be the person he was born to be: a true original. But although he was one of New York City’s most recognized and treasured figures, Bill Cunningham was also one of its most guarded. Written with his infectious joy and one-of-a-kind voice, this memoir was polished, neatly typewritten, and safely stored away in his lifetime. He held off on sharing it--and himself--until his passing. Between these covers, is an education in style, an effervescent tale of a bohemian world as it once was, and a final gift to the readers of one of New York's great characters.  Available to download: eBook  
 

Cover of In Pieces
Sally
Field

In this intimate, haunting literary memoir, an American icon tells her own story for the first time -- about a challenging and lonely childhood, the craft that helped her find her voice, and a powerful emotional legacy that shaped her journey as a daughter and a mother.  Available to download: eBook  Audio
 

Cover of There Will Be No Miracles
Casey
Gerald

Casey Gerald comes to our fractured times as a uniquely visionary witness whose life has spanned seemingly unbridgeable divides. His story begins at the end of the world: Dallas, New Year's Eve 1999, when he gathers with the congregation of his grandfather's black evangelical church to see which of them will be carried off. His beautiful, fragile mother disappears frequently and mysteriously; for a brief idyll, he and his sister live like Boxcar Children on her disability checks. When Casey--following in the footsteps of his father, a gridiron legend who literally broke his back for the team--is recruited to play football at Yale, he enters a world he's never dreamed of, the anteroom to secret societies and success on Wall Street, in Washington, and beyond. But even as he attains the inner sanctums of power, Casey sees how the world crushes those who live at its margins. He sees how the elite perpetuate the salvation stories that keep others from rising. And he sees, most painfully, how his own ascension is part of the scheme. Intense, incantatory, shot through with sly humor and quiet fury, There Will Be No Miracles Here inspires us to question--even shatter--and reimagine our most cherished myths.  Available to download: eBook  Audio

Cover of Late-Life Love
Susan
Gubar

Through an examination of her own marriage and literature on the longevity of desire by authors from Ovid and Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and Marilynne Robinson, Susan Goldblatt studies the obstacles many older couples overcome and marvels at the passion that buoys her own relationship. A memoir proving that love and desire have no expiration date, Late-Life Love is a resounding retort to negative valuations of old age and a celebration of second chances.
 

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Patrisse
Khan-Cullors

From one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Cullors' story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful. In this meaningful, empowering account of survival, strength, and resilience, Patrisse Cullors and asha bandele seek to change the culture that declares innocent black life expendable.  Available to download: eBook  Audio
 

Cover of Heavy: An American Memoir
Kiese
Laymon

In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse.  Available to download: eBook  Audio
 

Cover of Heart Berries: A Memoir
Terese Marie
Mailhot

Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father--an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist--who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.  Available to download: eBook  Audio
 

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Darnell L.
Moore

When Darnell Moore was fourteen, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they thought he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death. Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer, a leading Black Lives Matter activist, and an advocate for justice and liberation. In No Ashes in the Fire, he shares the journey taken by that scared, bullied teenager who not only survived, but found his calling. Available to download: eBook  
 

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Maggie
O'Farrell

I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O'Farrell's astonishing memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. Seventeen discrete encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, O'Farrell captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself.  Available to download: eBook  

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Gregory
Pardlo

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, his first work of prose: a deeply felt memoir of a family's bonds and a meditation on race, addiction, fatherhood, ambition, and American culture.

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Sarah
Smarsh

During Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the '80s and '90s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities. Combining memoir with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, this is an uncompromising look at class, identity, and the particular perils of having less in a country known for its excess.  Available to download: eBook  Audio
 

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Jeff
Tweedy

The singer, guitarist, and songwriter--best known for his work with Chicago rock band Wilco--opens up about his past, his songs, the music, and the people that have inspired him. Honest, funny, and disarming, Tweedy's memoir will bring readers inside both his life and his musical process, illuminating his singular genius and sharing his story, voice, and perspective for the first time.
 

Cover of Educated: A Memoir
Tara
Westover

Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.  Available to download: eBook  Audio
 

Cover of Eat the Apple: A Memoir
Matt
Young

Matt Young joined the Marine Corps at age eighteen. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases charged with making him a Marine. Matt survived the training and then not one, not two, but three deployments to Iraq. Visceral, ironic, self-lacerating, and ultimately redemptive, Young's story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the absurdism of 21st-century war, the manned-up vulnerability of those on the front lines, and the true, if often misguided, motivations that drove a young man to a life at war.
 

2017

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Sherman
Alexie

A searing, deeply moving memoir about family, love, loss, and forgiveness from the critically acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  Available to download: eBook  Audio
 

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Rana
Awdish

A riveting first-hand account of a physician who's suddenly a dying patient and her revelation of the horribly misguided standard of care in the medical world.
 

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Thomas J.
Brennan and Finbarr O'Reilly

Through the unpredictability of war and its aftermath, a decorated Marine sergeant and a world-trotting war photographer became friends, their bond forged as they patrolled together through the dusty alleyways of Helmand province and camped side by side in the desert. Their story, told in alternating first-person narratives, is about the things they saw and did, the ways they have been affected, and how they have navigated the psychological aftershocks of war and wrestled with reforming their own identities and moral centres.

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Claire
Dederer

From the New York Times best-selling author of Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, a ferocious, sexy, hilarious memoir about going off the rails at midlife and trying to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become.

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Richard
Ford

From American master Richard Ford, a memoir: his first work of nonfiction, a stirring narrative of memory and parental love.  Available to download: eBook  Audio

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Roxane
Gay

As a woman who describes her own body as "wildly undisciplined," New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In this deeply personal memoir, she explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen.  Available to download: eBook  Audio

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Sujatha
Gidla

The stunning true story of an untouchable family who become teachers, and one, a poet and revolutionary.  Available to download: eBook  Audio
 

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Coretta Scott
King

The life story of Coretta Scott King--wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change (The King Center), and singular twentieth-century American civil and human rights activist--as told fully for the first time, toward the end of her life, to Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds. Available to download: Audio

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Michelle
Kuo

A memoir of the life-changing friendship between an idealistic young teacher and her gifted student, jailed for murder in the Mississippi Delta.  Available to download: eBook  Audio

Cover of The Rules Do Not Apply
Ariel
Levy

All her life, Ariel Levy was told that she was too fervent, too forceful, too much. As a young woman, she decided that becoming a writer would perfectly channel her strength and desire. Levy moved to Manhattan to pursue her dream, and spent years of adventure, traveling all over the world writing stories about unconventional heroines, following their fearless examples in her own life. But when she experiences unthinkable heartbreak, Levy is forced to surrender her illusion of control. In telling her story, Levy has captured a portrait of our time, of the shifting forces in American culture, of what has changed and what has remained. And of how to begin again.

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Patricia
Lockwood

Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met--a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972." His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide. In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves emblematic moments from her childhood and adolescence with scenes that chronicle the eight-month adventure she and her husband had in her parents' household after a decade of living on their own.  Available to download: eBook

Cover of  Real American

A fearless memoir in which beloved and bestselling author Julie Lythcott-Haims pulls no punches in her recollections of growing up a black woman in America. Bringing a poetic sensibility to her prose to stunning effect, Lythcott-Haims briskly and stirringly evokes her personal battle with the low self-esteem that American racism routinely inflicts on people of color. The only child of a marriage between an African-American father and a white British mother, she shows indelibly how so-called "micro" aggressions in addition to blunt force insults can puncture a person's inner life with a thousand sharp cuts. Real American expresses also, through Lythcott-Haims's path to self-acceptance, the healing power of community in overcoming the hurtful isolation of being incessantly considered "the other."

Cover of Logical Family: A Memoir
Armistead
Maupin

In this long-awaited memoir, the beloved author of the bestselling Tales of the City series chronicles his odyssey from the old South to freewheeling San Francisco, and his evolution from curious youth to ground-breaking writer and gay rights pioneer.

Cover of Best of Us: A Memoir
Joyce
Maynard

Charting the course through the whirlwind romance between New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard and Jim, first true partner she had ever known, a marriage cut short by tragedy, and Joyce's return to singleness on new terms, The Best of Us is a heart-wrenching, ultimately life-affirming reflection on coming to understand true love through the experience of great loss.

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Kathy
McKeon

A coming-of-age memoir by a young woman who was Jackie Kennedy's personal assistant and sometime nanny for thirteen years describes her witness to significant historical events and the lessons about life and love she learned from the beloved First Lady.

Cover of Afterglow: A Dog Memoir
Eileen
Myles

Prolific and widely renowned, Eileen Myles is a trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work "set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match" (New York Review of Books). This newest book paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of a beloved confidant: the pit bull called Rosie.

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Michael
Perry

The beloved memoirist and bestselling author of Population: 485 reflects on the lessons he's learned from his unlikely alter ego, French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne. Written in a spirit of exploration rather than declaration, Montaigne in Barn Boots is a down-to-earth (how do you pronounce that last name?) look into the ideas of a philosopher "ensconced in a castle tower overlooking his vineyard," channeled by a midwestern American writing "in a room above the garage overlooking a disused pig pen." Available to download: eBook  Audio

Cover of The Bright Hour: A Memoir
Nina
Riggs

Built on her wildly popular Modern Love column, 'When a Couch is More Than a Couch' (9/23/2016), a breathtaking memoir of living meaningfully with 'death in the room' by the 38 year old great-great-great granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, mother to two young boys, wife of 16 years, after her terminal cancer diagnosis.”  Available to download: eBook  Audio

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Amy
Tan

In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. Supplied with candor and characteristic humor, Tan takes readers into her past and the idiosyncratic workings of her writer's mind, a journey that explores memory, imagination, and truth, with fiction serving as both her divining rod and link to meaning.  Available to download: eBook 

Cover of The Glass Eye
Jeannie
Vanasco

The night before her father dies, eighteen-year-old Jeannie Vanasco promises she will write a book for him. But this isn't the book she imagined. The Glass Eye is Jeannie's struggle to honor her father, her larger-than-life hero but also the man who named her after his daughter from a previous marriage, a daughter who died. After his funeral, Jeannie spends the next decade in escalating mania, in and out of hospitals--increasingly obsessed with the other Jeanne. A brilliant exploration of the human psyche, The Glass Eye deepens our definitions of love, sanity, grief, and recovery.